My friend MelHerb McGinnis, a cardiologist, was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.¶ The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. It was Saturday afternoon.Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were MelHerb and meI and his second wife, Teresa—Terri, we called her—and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque,then.But but we were all from somewhere else. ¶ (Lees de complete vergelijking van de versies van Beginners in The New Yorker)

'Beginners proves the point, long accepted among scholars, that the more expansive style of Carver’s later collections was the result of a change of management, rather than of personal transformation. But as even Carver well knew, Lish’s versions were frequently cleaner, more vigorous and more memorable than his originals. When he selected his favourite stories for the collection Where I’m Calling From, he chose to restore only three of his original versions while reprinting many of Lish’s edits in their entirety.' (Telegraph)

'This richness is missing from Lish’s edited versions...” Carver’s writings, for all their bleakness, hinge on moments of apprehension and epiphany. The stories in Beginners rarely end happily but Carver’s style, more expansive than Lish wanted, at least raises the possibility of self-realisation...' (Financial Times)